Vaclav Havel

Michal Novotny for The New York Times

Vaclav Havel led a revolution that overturned four decades of communism in his native Czechoslovakia, languished for years in prison, wrote 19 plays, survived nearly drowning and served 14 years as president — all the while remaining one of his generation’s most nonconformist writers. He died on Dec. 18, 2011 at his weekend house in the northern Czech Republic. He was 75.

A shy yet resilient, unfailingly polite but dogged man who articulated the power of the powerless, Mr. Havel came to personify the soul of the Czech nation. His moral authority and his moving use of the Czech language cast him as the dominant figure during Prague street demonstrations in 1989 and as the chief behind-the-scenes negotiator who brought about the peaceful transfer of power known as the Velvet Revolution, a revolt so smooth that it took just weeks to complete, without a single bullet fired.

He was chosen as democratic Czechoslovakia’s first president — a role he insisted was more duty than aspiration — and after the country split in January 1993, he became president of the Czech Republic. He linked the country firmly to the west, clearing the way for the Czech Republic to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1999 and the European Union five years later.

Both as a dissident and as a national leader, Mr. Havel impressed the West as one of the most important political thinkers in Central Europe

Yet while the west lionized him, when he left office, Mr. Havel remained a source of ambivalence, if not sometimes downright resentment, in his native Czech Republic. Some argued that Mr. Havel held onto the presidency too long for his claim of being a reluctant president to ring true. Others said that Mr. Havel was resented because he held up an uncomfortable mirror to the Czecks’ history of chronic passivity.

It is perhaps a sign of Mr. Havel’s mixed legacy that his successor was Vaclav Klaus, a right-wing maverick who fashioned himself the anti-Havel by railing against issues Mr. Havel championed, like the European Union and fighting climate change.

His star status drew world leaders to Prague, from the Dalai Lama, with whom Mr. Havel meditated for hours, to Bill Clinton, who serenaded him on his saxophone. Calling on the former dissident became a politically redemptive act.

Yet Mr. Havel’s presidency, which ended in 2003, was marked by a jovial eccentricity that endeared as well as repelled. He invited the Rolling Stones to the imposing Prague castle; covered the side of the castle with a large neon-red heart; hired female body guards — and drove along the castle’s endlessly long corridors in a red pedal scooter.

October 16, 2014, Thursday

The Rev. Tomas Halik, a leading intellectual in the Czech Republic, an ally of Vaclav Havel’s and an outspoken critic, has turned his attention to the Ukraine crisis, denouncing President Vladimir V. Putin as a “war criminal” for Russia’s...